I was talking to a friend over the weekend who had been in Japan during the week at a relatively high level meeting in which the aging of countries was discussed.

Apparently Japan has taken the view that they will not allow immigration of foreign nationals to provide support for their increasingly aging population. Their view is that their culture would be damaged and that the solution is in robots.

This has got to mean that there will be a tremendous amount of investment in all kinds of associated technologies, and an opportunity to establish global leadership in this area of business.

I think that this has very important implications for countries like Australia where we have a greying population, a phenomenal potential for continuing wealth generation as a result of the ongoing demand for resources and a limited amount of carrying power for the land itself because of water shortages.

One of the things that I dislike about downloading music from iTunes is that there is DRM present in the file.

If you rip a CD using iTunes and set it to rip as an mp3, you get a file that is infinitely copyable. If you download from iTunes, you have a limited option. And the problem with this is that if you get some corruption of the original file for some reason, you have no alternative but to purchase the song again.

Here is a handy little widget that fixes that problem. Doubletwist extracts the DRM code from the files making them easy to synch with an infinite number of devices. It was developed by the same guy that broke the encryption on the DVD.

Vertical search-engines

Know your subject

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas

ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.

This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...

For the last two days I have been doing meetings in Sandhill Road.

Met with some very smart (and successful) people. And they ask good questions too...

Sometimes I wonder though, how they really do make the decisions they do.... Yesterday I was in a meeting and dropped in passing the name of a company that has just been snapped up, reportedly for round $300M, and said I thought that the underlying technology seemed pretty trivial. The VC smiled, and said to me that he agreed. It had started out as something quite different, but they had made some changes, and then 6 million people started using it regularly and that is what commanded the value. Well, I get that. But I wonder how much luck is involved in the decision making process.

And that is because in almost the same breath we talked about another company that was sold recently for about $20M. The VC said that he had looked at about 75 companies doing almost exactly the same thing (video fx for user created content) and passed on all of them.

So when does a feature become a product?

"This is a discussion of the eight realities of technology and social experience that are shaping the world of today's teens and twenty-somethings.

It looks at the growing role of technology in teens' lives, the way they use their gadgets, their expectations about how to find and use information, and the social consequences of their use of technology."

by Lee Rainie Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project

I was talking to one of the engineers at Vquence early last week. He has a PhD in data mining. He told me how concerned he is about the amount of available information 'out there'. As a result he declines to blog or to comment on anything on line. He is very careful to ensure that anything he does is absolutely untracable to him.

His view is that anything that anyone says on line remains in place forever and that anyone who puts the information out there is likely to be held accountable at some stage.

I said to him that I totally understand the concept. The problem is that if we all acted that way we would all become totally compliant to what we think authority wants us to do. Isn't that what East Germany was about?

In spite of the knowledge that there may be forces in governments or corporations or elsewhere that want to control the way we think, speak, act - it is entirely counterproductive to do what we think that they want us to do. We need to work toward the greater good. We can not afford to be paranoid about what "they" may think about what "we" say....

It certainly means that what we do should be able to withstand the "front page of the Telegraph" test. But it doesn't mean that we should resile from saying what we think.

Phil was at Costco in Culver City yesterday. Shopping for a big screen TV. "We got a 52" already but I think I'll take that out, and put it into the bedroom and install a 60" on the wall." Plasma probably. That's several K. But Costco have a $499 deal for a 32"LCD on the website.

Big screens prices are plummeting and the demand is explosive. Phil isn't alone. American consumers want the big screens. Price drops get them drooling. There's big growth building here. And some previously no names; Olevia  and Sceptre; could be big winners.

But after you get the screen what next? HDTV. Internet hookups. All coming as the hardware mandates more content.

Some great press emerging on Audible Magic.

The really cool things that AM does come primarily from original IP that was created by Thom Blum, Erling Wold and the other original partners in MuscleFish. MuscleFish were one of the first companies to do serious wave form analysis and file matching of music/audio. They were subsequently acquired by Audible Magic.

I wish them well! They are a great bunch of guys.

It's no surprise we like video. It's the future. So good news. Today we announce a heavyweight contender launching into the video arena. We know it remakes content on the web. Why? Chris Gilbey founded it with a very fine technology thinker, Silvia Pfeiffer.

The company went public today in Sydney and Santa Monica. Read the release. Remember the name.


Sydney, Australia/Santa Monica,Ca

Australian start up video search, socialization and advertising company, Vquence, commences business today at the heart of the Internet hotspot, video, promising to remake the web experience.

“The Internet is now driven by video. The video quotient of any business or consumer communication: the VQ:is becoming the key factor of success” said co-founder and CEO, Chris Gilbey,

“Vquence helps solve revenue problems for content owners. We make finding videos easy for consumers. We hasten content distribution.”

Vquence provides a one stop shop for content owners to monetize video to consumers under one seamless umbrella. Vquence has a patent pending for an instantaneous approach to clickable video.

“Vquence’s technology and business model turn today’s video assets and costs into online reach and revenue. Consumers, publishers and content owners are united by Vquence” Gilbey noted.

The basis of Vquence is a technology leading video search engine. Users easily discover relevant video content. An authoring toolset then permits easy creation of a playlist of thin sliced videos (or ‘vquence’). The vquence is presented through a specialised video player. This playlist will play in any Web page. Users can cut and paste the code for their vquence into a blog or web page. Dynamic insertion by Vquence places ads into the vquence, based on relevance.

“Vquence boosts social networks.” Gilbey said, adding “Consumers find and aggregate video, then share it widely. They get paid. Content creators and publishers are rewarded from embedded ads in the vquences their communities share.

Initial seed funding to establish Vquence came from Information City Australia Limited, a Melbourne innovation incubator.

“This changes the market dynamic. Consumers become legitimate distributors of the video asset rather than pirates. In contrast, old school DRM brakes distribution” Gilbey said, continuing:

“Vquence gives consumers the ability to opt in or out of ads. Advertisers are getting smarter and making their messages more personal. Passive consumers no longer exist. It’s a community driven outlook now – with the emergence of almost a hive mind. The wisdom of crowds is a powerful market force.”

Vquence was formed in July 2006 by Gilbey and Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, a former CSIRO research scientist. Gilbey is a long time entrepreneur in the content and technology arenas, a former CEO of Lake Technology who consulted to Dolby Laboratories for two years on a global basis.

Dr Pfeiffer is a leading authority on Digital Media Analysis. During a seven year stint at CSIRO she led the team that developed Annodex, an open source platform for video distribution, and her continuing research over the last decade has deepened industry’s understanding of how to apply algorithms to analyse and mediate video content.

“Vquence takes the World Wide Web immeasurably closer towards a Web of Videos, where people build communities around video content published anywhere on the Web. But, uniquely, Vquence guarantees the original content owner will not lose an audience or their content.” Dr Pfeiffer noted.

“Video is the centre of the internet’s next big leap forward. Vquence will be one of the key accelerators.” Pfeiffer said.

The Vquence R&D team is internationally spread and headquartered in Sydney. The company expects to announce a slate of initial customers that includes media and content companies in both the US and Australia.

“Vquence lets consumers click through video and go beyond. Previously, all you could do was click to a video. Vquence is transformational. Vquence gives media publishers the powerful tools of comprehensive, easy search of all their video assets, and then super-distribution.” Dr Pfeiffer concluded.

About Vquence. Vquence is a video search, socialization, and advertising company that has a comprehensive model of monetizing video for content owners to consumers. Demonstrations of the technology are being conducted under NDA. The Vquence website has more information on the company. www.vquence.com. The company has offices in Sydney Australia and Santa Monica Ca.

This article at Science Daily descibes the DIY Fab@Home specification which can be built for about $2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts. You can download the specs from  the Fab@Home website. Amazing.

Yet another sci-fi scenario coming true. Neal Stephenson explored a world of networked fabrication in The Diamond Age.